Novels & Stories: The Magnificent Ambersons / Alice Adams / In the Arena: Stories of Political Life

In his greatest fiction Booth Tarkington wrote about the fragility of status in America’s ruthlessly dynamic society with keen realism and striking psychological insight. Here in one volume, edited by novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, are Tarkington’s best and most enduring works, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.A popular and critical triumph in its day and the inspiration for Orson Welles’s classic 1942 film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) is a brilliant family saga and a powerful dramatization of the vast social changes that swept America during the Gilded Age and its aftermath. Having amassed a fortune in the financial panic of 1873, Major Amberson, the family patriarch, established a palatial estate, an ostentatious monument to stability and permanence, in a city modeled closely on Tarkington’s native Indianapolis. But with the advent of new fortunes built on new technologies, especially the automobile, the family’s stature is suddenly imperiled, and the Major’s grandson George Minafer, a spoiled child and an equally insufferable young man, undergoes a “come-upance” of tragicomic proportion.The protagonist of Alice Adams (1921), which Tarkington called his “most actual and life-like work,” is one of the great heroines of American literature. Coming of age in a small midwestern town in the wake of World War I, Alice Adams is the emotional heart of her lower-middle-class family, torn between her mother’s driving social ambitions and her father’s good-natured apathy. When she catches the eye of a promising young gentleman, Alice tries to conceal the reality of her family’s straitened situation, leading her father to take a desperate act to ensure his daughter’s happiness. Relying on skills honed during his long career writing for the stage, Tarkington crafts unforgettably poignant scenes—a dance, a catastrophic dinner party—that dramatize the inner anguish of a complex and sensitive young woman who can see her prospects dwindling before her eyesComplementing these novels is the story collection In the Arena: Tales from Political Life (1905), a work borne of Tarkington’s brief but, for him, seminal career as an Indiana state representative. President Theodore Roosevelt, author of the famous 1910 speech, “The Man in the Arena,” so admired these stories that he invited Tarkington to lunch at the White House. Introducing the collection, whose tales deal with immigration, corruption, and other political problems still very much with us, Tarkington makes a plea for active engagement by citizens, even or especially when our democratic institutions are less than perfect: “When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”